The Cocoanuts: Annotated guide

4:33 - "Remember there is nothing like liberty, except Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post..."

Liberty, first published in 1924, was a magazine known as "a weekly for everybody". At one time second only to the Saturday Evening Post in circulation, it was accordingly known as "the second greatest magazine in America." Contributors included Robert Benchley and F Scott Fitzgerald. It folded in 1950.

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5:19 - "Couple of telegrams for you, Mr Hammer..."

As well as a rare chance to see Zeppo Marx come out from behind the hotel's reception desk, this moment gives us our first sighting of another of the most endearing features of The Cocoanuts: wet paper. Because of the crude sound recording technology then in use, ordinary paper crackled so obtrusively on the soundtrack that dialogue was completely drowned out. The ingenious solution was to douse all the paper used in scenes with liberal quantities of H2O, giving it a weird, limp quality, like rotting lettuce leaves. The inevitable problems caused by this solution to a different problem are especially enjoyable to witness in the 'why a duck?' scene, where the map Groucho is referring to visibly and repeatedly tears as he attempts to manipulate the sodden mess.

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9:19 - "John W Berryman was here last month to see it. You know, Berryman practically built Palm Beach and Miami..."

Was this a real man? Or is his name perhaps a mild parody of that of a real man? I don't know, but have fun watching Oscar Shaw grappling with that wet architectural plan.

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15:22 - "This is the biggest development since Sophie Tucker."

A pretty straightforward one, this; Tucker (1894-1966) of course being the Jewish singer and entertainer, known as 'the Last of the Red Hot Mamas', who popularised the song My Yiddishe Momme. Groucho, with characteristic chivalry, is drawing our attention to the star's considerable girth, which she herself highlighted in numbers like Nobody Loves a Fat Girl, But Oh How a Fat Girl Can Love.
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15:37 - "... entertainment, sandwiches and the auction. If you don't like auction we can play contract."

The first of many references in the Marx scripts to the tabletop diversions with which they filled their idle hours, first when they should have been at school and then when travelling the country or killing time backstage with fellow vaudevillians. Pinochle seems to have been their particular speciality, but all card games were grist to their mill, and this reference to bridge presages the classic bridge sequence from their next production Animal Crackers, and in particular Chico's line "he thought it was contact bridge".

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15:50 - "... glorifying the American sewer and the Florida sucker..."

'Glorifying' was a fashionable buzz-word at this time; in the same year as The Cocoanuts Paramount produced the film Glorifying the American Girl at their Long Island studios, also starring Mary Eaton. Groucho's line is either a reference to it or else a second dip in the same pool of common expressions. The replication of the word 'American' and the proximity of the two productions on the Paramount shooting roster incline me toward the former. It would be interesting to know, therefore, if the line was in the original show.

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16:09 - "Take the alligator pears..."

Another name for the avocado, derived from its tendency to grow in alligator-populated areas. Groucho's bizarre use of the term to imply sexual union between pears and alligators may be informed by some residual awareness of the long-standing connection between avocados and sexual potency. Long believed to possess aphrodisiac qualities, within polite society their consumption by the virginal or chaste was generally frowned upon. Interestingly, the name comes from the Nahuatl word for testicle, a reference in this case to its shape rather than its sphere of influence.

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18:50 - Harpo's red wig

Note how late into the movie Chico and Harpo make their entrance, then enjoy the only appearance on screen of Harpo's dark red stage wig, henceforth abandoned in favour of a blonde one because it was felt the original photographed too dark. Personally, I much prefer the red one. Interestingly, Harpo is still referred to as a redhead in Animal Crackers, since the script derives from the stage production and no amendment was made to accommodate his new, lighter coiffure.

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20:18 - "Everything will be AK"

Wikipedia lists 24 possible definitions for this seeming alternative to 'ok'; the most likely to me seemed to be 'Ace-King', a card combination in poker, until I received the following fascinating suggestion from LAGuy, who blogs at the excellent Pajama Guy: "I'm pretty sure, considering the Marx boys' origin, that AK means "alter kocker," a well-known Yiddish term. It literally means "old shitter" and refers, in a negative way, to old people. Jewish contemporaries would get the reference immediately. Hence, in the 1931 musical Of Thee I Sing, Ira Gershwin has the Supreme Court parade out front and sing 'We're the A.K.s who give the O.K.s'."

I like the sound of this explanation very much: Cocoanuts has a lot of Jewish in-jokes.
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21:40 - "Have one of these flowers, they're buckwheat."

A mystery, since Groucho appears to be offering Harpo the plant on the grounds that it is dangerous. At least, that's how the joke plays to me; as if he were to cheerfully say "here, drink this, it's cyanide." Though buckwheat greens eaten in large enough quantities can cause excessive sensitization of the skin to sunlight, it is generally speaking both edible and widely eaten. It may be, therefore, that I have misread the joke completely, and Groucho is in fact offering Harpo some kind of poisonous plant on the spurious grounds that it is buckwheat. Or am I so wrong it's like not even funny? Let me know...

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22:20 - Chico and Harpo play the Anvil Chorus using a till and a bullhorn

The first appearance in the Marx canon of this top choon from Il Trovatore. Animal Crackers the following year sees a spirited rendition with Chico on piano, Harpo on horseshoes and Groucho on a woman's leg, while in A Night at the Opera they get the chance to disrupt a live stage performance of Verdi's undefending masterpiece.

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26:45 - Harpo's first Gookie

If you don't know why a Gookie - a grotesque facial contortion characterised by bulging eyes, inflated cheeks and visible tongue, assumed by Harpo at least once in every Marx Brothers movie - is so named, then you haven't read Harpo Speaks, so do so now and we'll meet back here when you've finished. For the rest of you, enjoy its first appearance here.

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28:39 - Harpo plays the clarinet

As well as harp and piano, the former Adolph Marx was no mean clarinetist, as this charming rendition of When My Dreams Come True reveals. In his later career he also liked to get laughs with a prop clarinet on which he would play I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles while a cascade of soap bubbles streamed from the instrument. Nonetheless, this is the only time he played it on film, and it was always the harp that remained his first love and daily source of recreation, relaxation and contemplation, thus sparing us the potential necessity of having to refer to him as Clarineto.

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30:47 - Groucho and Margaret Dumont enter stage right

Often cited as one of the most amusingly hackneyed moments in the film, this delightful sequence shows Groucho and Mags walking on-set in long shot before cutting to a medium shot as they begin their dialogue. The point, of course, is that the walk on is a purely theatrical convention quite unnecessary in a film, which might more zippily have cut straight to the dialogue. For exactly this reason, I find it absolutely charming. What we can all agree on, however, is the excellence of the ensuing, our first Groucho-Dumont wooing scene. There is nothing tentative or embryonic about it; both are on top form.

Dumont, I need not add, is Groucho's celebrated statuesque straightwoman, imported from the Broadway cast, who would go on to endure his crude insults and even cruder sexual advances in a further six films. So fine are their performances together that she is frequently referred to as "practically the fifth Marx Brother" or "the honorary Marx Brother". However, this billing - which would in any event have come as news to Gummo and, presumably, her gynaecologist - was never made official, thus sparing us the potential necessity of having to refer to her as Practicallyo, or possibly Honoraryo.

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31:29 - "If we could find a little bungalow..."

This Groucho line anticipates one of Irving Berlin's songs from the original show excised, presumably for time, from the screenplay. Several other lines from A Little Bungalow, for so it is called, find echo in Groucho's dialogue in this scene:
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A little bungalow an hour or so from anywhere

A little cozy nest, the kind that's best for two

Among the shady trees, with birds and bees, and lots of air

And just enough o' ground to fool around with you

Away from all the crowds we'll watch the clouds go drifting by

And when the moon above presents a lovely view

There'll be a room in blue, the one that you would occupy

It's understood that I would occupy it too.

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In particular, the third couplet evokes his memorable line, "when the moon is sneaking around the clouds, I'll be sneaking around you..."

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32:45 - "A 'yes' like that was once responsible for me jumping out of a window."

A Groucho line which, depending on your preference, is either gloriously meaningless or evocative of some unspecified but clearly disastrous sexual indiscretion. There are many anecdotes concerning the brothers' erotic escapades that frequently end in such compromising manoeuvres, but they tend to involve the more incorrigible Chico than bookish, less experienced Groucho.

One exception, however, is the story of Groucho and Chico enjoying the afternoon attentions of the daughters of a prominent Jewish businessman who had invited them to dinner on the sabbath. His unexpected return led to just such an escape, and Chico's enquiry "are we still on for Friday?"

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36:50 - The Connecting Door Sketch

This beautifully played scene, with Dumont having to resist the attentions of Groucho and Harpo, Kay Francis having to resist the attentions of Groucho, Harpo and Chico while looking great in a slinky gown, the first of a number of dumb Irish cops called Hennessey or something very similar rushing ineffectually from room to room, and Zeppo presumably downstairs manning the lobby, is notable partly for its excellence, and also for its being revised by Kaufman to equally fine effect in A Night at the Opera.

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42:45 - "I can let you have three lots watering the front, or I can let you have three lots fronting the water."

Is this a misdelivered line? Joe Adamson certainly thinks so in Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo. Clearly the obvious way of phrasing it is the other way around. But is it funny this way? Yes, it is.

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43:58 - "You know what a blueprint is?" "It's oysters."

Chico's error here is to confuse a blueprint with a bluepoint, a bluepoint oyster being a type of oyster named, pleasantly enough, after the Blue Point area of Long Island, where the film was shot.

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44:32 - "Come over here, Rand McNally."

Groucho mocks Chico's inability to get to grips with the details of his map of the locality by referring to him as America's most famous publisher of maps and atlases.

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44:42 - "Is there a remote possibility you know what 'radius' means?" "It's-a WJZ."

Chico compounds his blueprint/bluepoint error with a further confusion, this time between radius and radio. WJZ refers to a New York radio station based at that time in Newark, New Jersey. According to Wikipedia "the call letters stood for their original home state, New Jer(Z) sey", which to these English eyes at least makes about as much sense as Groucho's rejoinder "that's a rodeo you're thinking of."

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46:06 - "I'm not playing Ask Me Another"

From The Time of Laughter: A Sentimental Chronicle of the Twenties by Corey Ford:

"So great was the parlor-game craze in the twenties that Viking Press brought out a question book called Ask Me Another. To arouse added interest, the editors tested the questions in advance on various celebrities... George Kaufman (was tested) on geography, a subject which bored him thoroughly. When asked 'what is the longest river in South America?' Kaufman pondered a moment, and then countered, 'Are you sure it's in South America?'"

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47:52 - "Be alert - or papa don't go out at all."

A (presumably) meaningless reference to the song Mama Goes Where Papa Goes, made famous by Sophie Tucker ("Mama Goes Where Papa Goes / Or Papa don't go out tonight"). First published in 1923, Tucker also recorded a Yiddish version the following year.

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63:29 - Harpo offers sobbing Polly a lolly

This utterly disarming moment in which Harpo abandons all trace of lechery and mischief, and manages to be affectingly sweet without any hint of unwelcome pathos (the blank facial expression is the trick) is both one of the most celebrated moments in the film and an interesting anticipation of a moment at the very other end of their film career, when he produces a second lolly during the Who Stole That Jam? number from Love Happy, leading to the song line: "I don't want that lollipop!"

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65:00 - "Hey, Paisan!"

Chico's term to summon Harpo is an affectionate Italian (or Italian American) greeting meaning "brother", colloquially or, in this case, literally. Of all the things I didn't know and had to look up for the purposes of this exercise, discovering this one gave me the most pleasure.
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74:50 - Harpo's big spliff

The most eye-openingly pre-Code moment in the entire Marx canon is when Harpo enters the fancy dress wedding party dressed as a Mexican gaucho puffing on an enormous joint. Marijuana, though coming to be recognised as a social menace, was far from taboo in American popular culture, particularly jazz, and it crops up in a few other American comedies of the time. As late as 1933 Paramount's International House, a comic revue with W C Fields and Burns & Allen, includes Cab Calloway singing Reefer Man.

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79:13 - "Oft in the stilly night, the trembling of a leaf can be heard sighing through the trees, and the babbling brook.."

I think that rather than any one thing, this is a kind of generic, half-remembered conflation of several poems and poetic-sounding phrases, with 'Oft in the stilly night' derived from Thomas Moore, and the babbling brook, possibly, from New York poet Elaine Goodale Eastman.

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79:38 - "Western cattle opened at fifteen and a quarter"

Groucho goes into stockmarket talk just as he would in Animal Crackers but with one big difference - the Crash came in between.

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82:58 - "That's that good Gulf gas."

Refers to the slogan used by Gulf petrol, displayed on the side of pumps in service stations.

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83:49 - "A Cup of Coffee, a Sandwich and You from the opera Aida"

A little disappointing to learn that Groucho's hilarious intro to Chico's first piano number refers to the title of a real song. I always thought it was an incredibly inspired joke. Ah, well. But it is, at least, an absolutely adorable song. Find out a little more and, most importantly, hear it for yourself here.

In praise of The Cocoanuts

The Cocoanuts (1929), the Marx Brothers' first movie, is a majestic comedy that finds them at their most energetic and inspired and belongs among their very highest achievements.

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This is not, however, its reputation.

For many the fact that it is technically primitive, shot entirely on small studio sets with undiscriminating sound recording, a graceless camera and static theatrical set-ups, is for some unfathomable reason an obstacle to enjoying it.

Paul D. Zimmermann wrote: "The camerawork showed all the mobility of a concrete fire hydrant caught in a winter freeze." Thank God, then, that the Marx Brothers were in front of it at the time, being hilarious. Otherwise that could have caused a few problems.

Others, like Allen Eyles, note "its silly plot and dated musical elements". Yes, nothing spoils a Marx Brothers movie like a silly plot. And as for that dated music, the date it seems to have plumped for is 1929, so no complaints from me there, either.
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For me, the music of the Paramount Marx films is just another of their great joys, and I'll not hear a word against the second leads, either. Mary Eaton, Oscar Shaw, Kay Francis, Lillian Roth, Hal Thompson, Margaret Irving and the rest are all terrific. I know it is considered de rigeur to love the Marxes alone, and snort haughtily and derisively through the songs and subplots, but if you're one of those who do, know now that my friends and I consider your behaviour the very height of naff.

("A rendition of 'the skies will all be blue / When my dreams come true' is enough to convince us that the 1920s had their down side", suggests Simon Louvish in his book Monkey Business. It seems pretty charming to me.)

There's a feeling abroad that the free display of disrespect towards the secondary elements is what the Marxes would themselves have done, that hooting at Allan Jones is somehow of a piece with throwing fruit and vegetables at Margaret Dumont. I feel this is profoundly mistaken, and that the Brothers would have been appalled at such ignorant rudeness towards fellow showbusiness professionals.

It is sheer philistinism to be unable to see the beauty of Lillian Roth's performance of Why Am I So Romantic?, or the difference between Kenny Baker trilling Two Blind Loves and Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle's gorgeous performance of Alone. The songs in the Paramount films, including Irving Berlin's universally-mocked numbers in The Cocoanuts all delight me, and in particular Berlin's Monkey Doodle Doo boasts lyrics so weird they deserve quoting in full:

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Monkeys upon a tree never are very blue.

They never seem to be under par that is true.

Not like the ones you see on a bar in the zoo.

Monkeys upon a tree do the Monkey Doodle Doo.

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Oh, among the mangoes where the monkey gang goes

You can see them do

The little Monkey Doodle Doo.

Oh, a little monkey playing on his one key

Gives them all the cue

To do the Monkey Doodle Doo.

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Let me take you by the hand

Over to the jungle band

If you're too old for dancing

Get yourself a monkey gland

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And then let's go, my little dearie, there's the Darwin theory

Telling me and you

To do the Monkey Doodle Doo.

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Tell me that man wasn't on the same wavelength as the Marx Brothers!

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Shot not in Hollywood but at Paramount's Long Island studios (where so many of history's most beautiful and evocative films were nonchalantly tossed together) while Animal Crackers was still cutting up Broadway, the film catches the performers at the height of their powers.

It also benefits from some of the most expertly-tailored material they were ever given. The great playwright George S Kaufman is a massive part of what's so great about the Marx Brothers. His work here and in Animal Crackers helps define (or certainly refine) them as an act (and his astute recall for A Night at the Opera is probably the sole reason why that film is as bafflingly good as it is).

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It is vitally important to locate the Marx Brothers we know, the Marx Brothers leaping to life here (as opposed to, say, the Vaudeville Marx Brothers who are now lost to us but were surely a cruder and broader and in many ways less distinctive force than the one here preserved), in the tradition of twenties New York humour, that sprang from the pages of the New Yorker on to the Broadway stage and then to talking pictures. Into the world of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley and Alexander Woollcott and indeed Kaufman (a world that the off-stage Harpo himself would soon crash in a kind of mascot capacity) came a wild, unpretentious but uncommonly talented comedy team. This team was then taken under the collective wing of the wits and sophisticates there assembled. Something about the unrestrained anarchy of the Marx Brothers' comic tornado appealed to their delight in disrupting propriety, and it was they who gave them the impetus, opportunity and material necessary to become the fashionable darlings of high class audiences.

Kaufman inherited a team too well-defined to reinvent, but working with what he was given it was he who who made their rough-edged style perfect, bestowing upon them the finest wordplay, wildest ideas and most sustained flights of insanity, where absurdist argument develops rigidly by its own internal form of anti-logic. The 'Why a duck' sequence, first and perhaps best of the great Groucho-Chico duologues (though I retain a sneaking preference for the left-handed moths of Animal Crackers) is justly famous, but even funnier is the auction scene to which it serves as prelude, with Chico's obtuse refusal to stop bidding up, and Groucho's deliriously exasperated attempts to maintain enthusiasm:

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What am I offered for Lot 25? Come on, folks, you know you're all allowed to bid, this is a free country. What am I offered for Lot 25? What am I offered for Lot 25 and a year's subscription to Youth's Companion? Will somebody take a year's subscription? I'm trying to work my way through college. Will somebody take a six months' subscription? I'll go to high school. Does anybody want to buy a lead pencil? I'll wrestle anybody in the crowd for five dollars.

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The script, like all early Marx material, is also satiric and rooted in the culture of its exact historical moment. The setting is the Florida land boom of the nineteen-twenties. The invention strikes me as classic Kaufman: given an act a large part of whose comic persona revolves around conning, duplicity and pretensions to affluence, status and power entirely at odds with the reality of their situation, it is both natural and inspired to look around for the perfect contemporary setting with which to transform them from sketch artists in revues to characters in musical comedy, and hit upon the Florida real estate bubble. (Sorry that was such a long sentence, but it's all over now.) Groucho's character, in particular, lends itself exactly to such a milieu (Louvish has some good material contrasting Groucho's characteristic pronouncements in the film with those of real Florida entrepreneurs), as, on a much lower level of aspiration and attainment, do those of his seedy lieutenants Harpo and Chico, the latter of whom makes no secret of his desire to fleece the fleecer, and the former of whom steals the cutlery that Groucho has himself stolen from other hotels. (Look out too for a fourth brother, Zeppo, occasionally to be seen hiding behind the desk in the hotel lobby. And make the most of him. He has even less to do in Animal Crackers.)

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To this irresistible recipe, Kaufman then adds that simplest yet most elusive seasoning: almost unbelievably great jokes. Get the most artful comedy team ever to deliver them, and you have The Cocoanuts. Woollcott raved, Broadway fell like Troy and the rest, as they say, is cliché.

The Cocoanuts is a great moment in Broadway history, and it is to the film's credit that it merely replicates the exact experience of the show and makes no effort to turn it into a movie. From Monkey Business on we have the Marx Brothers at the movies; for the time being, let's enjoy them on stage.

Director Robert Florey recalled his efforts to include real Florida location shooting being rebuffed by the studio brass with what still seems to me to be the perfect dismissal of all those who affect to having their enjoyment compromised by the artificial nature of the production:

"Why are you so concerned with having real backgrounds when one of the leading characters wears an obviously false moustache?"

Kay Francis and Pre-Code

Kay Francis plays Penelope, the vampish bad girl who inspires the jewel robbery in The Cocoanuts.

If you don’t know the name, it may be surprising to discover that she became perhaps the biggest star of all Marx co-stars bar Marilyn, though sadly few others of her magnitude have been quite so thoroughly forgotten.

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She was an amazingly chic woman, a celebrated clotheshorse who set rather than followed the styles. She thought herself of little account and did not greatly enjoy her stardom, though it lasted until the end of the thirties (despite a considerable speech impediment and a far from conventional beauty), and only slowly and respectfully tapered off thereafter in low budget variations.

She said that she couldn’t wait to be forgotten and for reasons genuinely mysterious, more or less has been.
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In the movies, when she's remembered at all, it's usually as an ultra-fashionable modern woman, a big wage earner and a big spender, confident, independent, dressed in incredible gowns, with shiny, jet black hair and soulful make-up. Sometimes this character has a big, life-defining episode to live through over the hour and fifteen, sometimes she’ll just be effortlessly elegant and life will not trouble her. Think Lubitsch’s Trouble In Paradise.
Or, just as often, she’s a bitch, a vamp, a man-eater, a conwoman even; pretending to be some kid’s mother so she can carve off his inheritance, or nonchalantly, gloatingly stealing Fay Wray’s husband away from her. These are the roles where the hair is slicked right back, cloche hats are prominent, and Francis assumes the haughtiest manner imaginable as she seduces her way to gain; this is the Francis that robs Margaret Dumont of her jewels with Harpo under the bed and Groucho in the wardrobe.

It was, in fact, her first film role; she had been part of the huge contingent of Broadway actors and actresses imported to Hollywood to cope with the new demands of talking cinema. Her slightly decadent, aloof qualities and air of European sophistication ensured that she ended up at Paramount, most stylish of the major studios.

She followed up her stint with the Marxes with a host of great movies: Dangerous Curves (1929) with Clara Bow, Behind the Make-Up (1930) with Fay Wray and interesting Vaudeville settings, Paramount On Parade (1930; anyone know why the Marx Brothers are not in this movie?), Ladies Man (1930) with Carole Lombard, and the amazing Girls About Town (1931). All reward the effort of tracking them down.
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Despite the length and success of her career subsequently, Francis is one of the stars who most define pre-Code as an era. She seemed the embodiment of the sultry and languorous sensibilities of Paramount, for whom she did most of her voluptuary work. Like the Marxes, Kay left Paramount for another studio (in her case Warners) and her work altered significantly in the transition. At Warner Brothers, she made her high society issue films and weepy women's pictures. But her work in her early Paramount films still makes you sit up.

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Her appeal, I think, is that she was very much an icon of the ‘lost generation’; she would have made an excellent Brett Ashley. She often plays characters of great material attainment and deep existential dislocation; few actresses of her generation so ably conveyed ennui, fatalism and erotic gloom.
Watch her in the opening scenes of 24 Hours (1931), a fantastic pre-Code society drama from Paramount, in which (anticipating Trouble In Paradise) she co-stars with an equally top-form Miriam Hopkins.

She’s at a small party, depressed, bored, incredibly alluring in a very simple white dress, clearly the most fascinating woman in the room, but crippled with dissatisfaction and a physical beauty she carries like a hernia. (You have to go back to Louise Brooks in Germany for anything comparable.)

Any dedicated Kay fan will recognise this opening as trademark stuff. This is screen presence of a very particular sort, and hugely symbolic of its cultural moment. World-weariness was in at the time, combine it with sexual independence, the very latest outfits and a willingness to seduce or be seduced, and icons are born.

It is in this respect that Kay Francis is an icon not of old Hollywood merely, but of pre-Code specifically. Her world is one of great luxury, tired of the novelties in which it trades, from which she is always an arm's length removed, bored with the parties and the good times and the infidelities and superficiality.

Penelope in The Cocoanuts is how many of her later characters must have started out, before getting fed up somewhere along the way. (Or, in a few cases, carrying on just as she was: try The False Madonna [1931].)
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In many ways, we can also consider the Paramount Marx movies as themselves representative of pre-Code. I might even go so far as to suggest that in addition to all the reasons we normally cite, a huge part of why Paramount Marx Brothers movies are better than MGM Marx Brothers movies is because they look, sound and feel like what they are: pre-Code movies.
After 1934 the Brothers stop playing their satires against backgrounds like the Florida land boom or society parties and start hanging round circuses. Several things are lost in this transition.

First, the satire is inevitably blunted: if the world being deflated is not recognisable, real and modern, then the Marx Brothers have lost a huge part of their comedic edge: who cares if they are set in the old west or some boring department store? Without the ability to play against a milieu that is recognisable to the audience the team’s power is diluted.

Even the joyous A Night at the Opera (1935) is in this sense as much a portent of what is to come as a last hurrah. The fun of seeing them take on grand opera is far cosier and more remote from the everyday experience of most cinemagoers, and panders to their prejudices. Far better have them satirise inane, popular genre cinema (as they do in Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup, parodies of society gangster films, college pictures and Ruritanian fantasies respectively) or take on the Long Island set in a spirit of genuine anarchy. They are not anarchists in A Night at the Opera, merely crazies. But in The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers and Monkey Business they really are dangerous to have around. The Code era takes the danger away.

How the Marx Brothers and I first met

In 1983, I was ten years old. Great Britain had three television channels (or was it four by then? not many, that's the point), and they stopped transmitting around midnight (at which time the station announcer would traditionally tell us to sleep well and not to forget to unplug the tv set, before playing the national anthem).
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On December 23rd at 10.30 pm, BBC-2 showed Monkey Business. It was the first of five films being shown over the Christmas period (all the Paramounts bar The Cocoanuts, plus A Night In Casablanca).
I was intrigued by the prospect of these films. I remember the trailer shown to promote them (it certainly featured the barking dog in Harpo's chest from Duck Soup), and especially the grainy black and white images of the Brothers on the Radio Times programme page (reproduced above left).
Nonetheless, I was at some family party or something that evening, and did not particularly notice or care that I would be missing it.
I returned home at about eleven, and idly switched on my black and white portable, just in time for the Chevalier impressions.
I had never laughed so much before in my life; here was a whole new level of amusement I had never previously attained. By the time Groucho announced that "a lady's diamond earring has been lost; it looks exactly like this - in fact, this is it") I was an addict.
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During the course of that one, magical Christmas, I watched every other film in the series (and crudely copied the soundtrack of the last, Animal Crackers, on audio tape using a mic that also picked up every other sound being made in the room), wrote my first book on the subject (a little short on factual information but strong on crude felt-tipped pen illustrations) and, to my family's bewilderment, talked of virtually nothing else.
I still had a lot to learn: in fact, I thought it was Zeppo that played the piano. But I soon caught up.
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The next year I learned all the basics from a chapter of a lovely book called Movies of the Thirties and found Harpo Speaks almost as exciting as the films themselves. (I still do.)
Over the next two or three years I caught up first with Love Happy ("one of the more famous of the Marx Brothers' later films" was how the BBC continuity announcer described it before its Saturday morning showing), then The Cocoanuts (Saturday afternoon on Channel Four and fully as magical as the first batch), then the rest (which still seem to me to be just that: 'the rest').
Since then, I have seen each dozens and dozens of times. I have been fortunate to have seen them all at least once at the cinema, where they belong; A Night at the Opera at least ten times. On television: each beyond counting.
I never turn down an opportunity to see them, but I always make sure I watch the Paramount ones at Christmas time, as near as possible to those magical, original 1983 dates and times of transmission. The following year, BBC-2 introduced me to Hammer horror films, and that's an intense and special memory, too. But first and foremost, Christmas is the Marx Brothers and the Marx Brothers are Christmas.

Introducing the Marx Brothers Annotated Film Guide (or MBAFG, pronounced ‘Mbafg’)

Too much analysis, they say, is the death of comedy. Take a joke apart to see how it works, they add, and you’ll never get it back together again.

Of these people we might justifiably ask; what is 'habeas Irish rose'? What is happening when you “have a strange interlude”, and why are we fortunate Theatre Guild isn’t putting it on? What is the trial of Mary Dugan with sound? What is a college widow? Who are those five kids up in Canada? Exactly when did Don Ameche invent the telephone?

The films of the Marx Brothers are full of in-jokes and obscure theatrical, literary and topical references that can baffle modern audiences. This site will, in part, strive to explain such mysteries, and where it is unable to do so it will request that you help it out. And when it thinks it can, but you think it's wrong, it will happy for you to say so.
In so doing, I hope we will illuminate a lot of other things too, as we journey on a thorough but unsystematic ramble through the landscape of these remarkable comedies. Bring their world back to life, so to speak.

So it will hopefully become both a newcomer's guide and an addict’s resource, a source of contention and of illumination, a mire of speculation and an oasis of confirmation, and all of these things at one and the same time.
If it is aimed a little more (but I hope by no means exclusively) at the confirmed enthusiast rather than the novice, that's simply because I can’t really be bothered to repeat all those anecdotes you find in every other resource on the Marx Brothers. But if you want to know which famous sequence in one of the Paramount films features doubles miming to the Brothers’ dialogue, why it’s not clever to laugh at Alan Jones or, indeed, what the trial of Mary Dugan with sound is, stick with us. There are only two kinds of people in the world: those who love the Marx Brothers and those who have not yet seen them. This is a site for the former group, but if you are among the latter category you are emphatically welcome too.